made disaster preparations, environmental protection, rural reconstruction
and protection against agricultural imports, in addition to government funds to
promote high-tech and biomedical industries, strengthening the defense industry,
energy saving and gas emission controls, etc.
Admittedly, the needs of all these programs have been recognized by
the new government. Nevertheless, the programs need strong public financial
backing and supports. We believe these programs are good uses of the fiscal
space. They are essential to stabilize and revitalize the current economy and
society, and vital to raise the standard of living and economic performance for
future economic growth of Taiwan.
Appendix A Comparison of Original and Revised CIA 2015
Government Budget Estimates
The dataset of Figures 1 to 3 are taken from CIA World Factbook in August,
2016. When we started preparing for the final draft of this paper in November
2016, we found that the CIA data have been changed without any notes or
explanations. We also noticed that almost all of the estimation dates are the same
as the July dataset, except for five countries, which have different estimation
dates. Among the 219 countries, the data of 100 countries have increased, 83
decreased, and 36 have no change.
Table A1 shows that the average of the revised data
5
has decreased slightly
from -3.92 to -4.03, and the median are the same. Note that about 80 percent to
85 percent of the countries in the world had budget deficits, and only 2 percent to
3 percent balanced the government budgets.
5
In the revised data, a peculiar exception is Anguilla, it has increased from old -4.1% to revised 5025.4%.
Thus, we excluded Anguilla from the calculation of average but included it in the calculation of median.
108
